Why some states make national citizenship accessible while others do not, and whether democratic pressure pushes states toward inclusion is the focus of an on-going three-year study by UC Irvine political science professor and chair Sara Goodman.

“Citizenship laws are important to study because they simultaneously define who can participate in a national election and who belongs in the nation,” she says. “And while autocratic contexts may not provide opportunities to formally participate like democracies, shaping a cohesive nation remains an important goal.”

To examine the political factors that determine citizenship policy, her project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is collecting global data of laws for gaining and losing citizenship, across countries and over time. With this comparative view, she’s examining the relationship between regime values and how states define their national communities. The work seeks to advance prosperity and welfare, especially in terms of how obtaining citizenship can create security and opportunity for immigrants and diasporic communities, she says.

“While existing scholarship focuses largely on contemporary politics, ranging from the role of far-right political parties and social mobilization to court decisions, there is a lack of theories that considers factors beyond democratic politics,” she says. “My project theorizes that regime-level factors create meaningful contexts for understanding variation in citizenship policy settings. As a result, democracies and autocracies may both maintain similarly accessible (or restrictive) citizenship laws but be motivated by distinct reasons.”

Working with colleagues at EUI’s Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), her project will support the expansion of the Global Citizenship Law Dataset, which describes laws for gaining and losing citizenship, across 191 countries and between the years 1960 and 2024.

“With this novel dataset, we will be able to examine the relationship between citizenship policy and regime-type both cross-case and over time, making significant contributions to scholarly literature on citizenship and migration, public policymaking, welfare, immigration politics, and democratization,” she says.

Funding for this project – which began in August 2024 and runs through July 2027 – additionally supports graduate research assistants working on data collection, cleaning and analysis, along with a planned international conference on comparative citizenship law.